modern textual studies

A game for critically deconstructed theorists:

1. take your favorite modern text;
2. xerox it on poster board;
3. cut the poster board into playing cards;
4. commodify the cards and throw away the signifieds;
5. shuffle and deal;
6. marginalize the center and center the periphery;
7. read the text;
8. write your reading of the text in an appropriately scholarly fashion;
9. publish on University of Minnesota Press or Routledge.

Notes:
Remember that everything is a text, or rather, there is nothing outside the text.
Advanced players may xerox a xerox of a xerox without an orginal, if desired.

Not only [the above], but also a way of taking apart ancient texts and finding out that they don't mean anything after all. This technique, which began in the late 19th century, assumed that works as old as parts of the Old Testament (most notably the Pentateuch), the Iliad, and the Odyssey couldn't possibly have been written way back when. They also hit upon the idea (laird knows why) that none of these works could have been written by a single person, and most certainly were cobbled together by the RAND Corporation, Francis Bacon, or a secret council of the Roamin' Catlick Church.

Although the ideas that percolated out of this morass were created in ignorance of the actual age of written language (in other words, they didn't know back then that writing was around a lot earlier than they thought: archeology was not as advanced as it is now), their ideas have not undergone the drastic re-evaluation they so richly deserve, except in rare instances, viz., the work of Milman Parry.

The fact remains, this technique--however weird or unreliable--is still one of the best methods for crossing from fiction to non-fiction and back again. Robert Anton Wilson, using his own work as subject material, made some great fiction arise from nonfiction. I wouldn't trust sources that did this to older texts, because that synchronicity is going to be severely diluted by the
translation. Don't ever underestimate the powers of translation--it was translation, and little more, that produced the entire regime of the Holy Mother Church.